Actors Anonymous

A Novel

The actors in James Franco's brilliant debut novel include a McDonald's drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers and Midwestern transplants; a vampire flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor gone AWOL; and the ghost of River Phoenix. Then there's Franco himself, who prowls backstage, peering out between the lines--before taking the stage with fascinating meditations on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess. "Hollywood has always been a private club," he writes. "I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside ."

Told in a dizzying array of styles--from lyric essays and disarming testimonials to hilariously rambling text messages and ghostly footnotes--and loosely modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Actors Anonymous is an intense, wild ride into the dark heart of celebrity.

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This novel was an honest, and humorous read, which I liked. Although, for me personally, it got a bit slow half-way through, and caused me to lose some interest. But that's besides that point, if you're a fan of J.F then you'd most likely be intrigued, but otherwise I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to anyone opposite of that, perhaps
for example; somebody like my mom. You definitely have to be a fan of Franco, or at least interested in investigating the closed doors behind his career, and (somewhat of a promiscuous) life. Cheers.